Scalable Hosting Solutions

AIT is the leader in cloud website hosting

What is Scalable Cloud Hosting?

Scalability is a key reason a lot of users move to cloud infrastructure as a service. Cloud is dynamic, so you don’t have to be exactly right the first time when it comes to what your application needs in the cloud. Scalable Cloud Hosting organizations to control their resources and pay only for what they use. The nature of the cloud makes scaling up and down easier and more affordable than traditional hosting solutions because organizations usually don’t have to purchase all the resources upfront to handle temporary resource demand peaks. Organizations can avoid upfront infrastructure costs, and focus on projects that differentiate their businesses instead of on long term infrastructure investment. Cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and enables IT to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand. Cloud providers typically use a "pay as you go" model. There are two types of cloud scaling – vertical and horizontal.

Vertical Scaling

Vertical scaling, or scaling up, usually involves increasing workloads and adding resources to existing systems. Vertical scaling usually requires that the host add more capability to a machine or a system by installing additional resources. Using a desktop computer analogy, vertical scaling is equivalent to adding more memory or upgrading software. Vertical scaling can essentially resize your server with no change to your code. It is the ability to increase the capacity of existing hardware or software by adding resources. Resources like number of CPU cores, bandwidth, disk space and RAM can be allocated based on demand. These options can be changed without having to completely migrate hosts or create a virtual machine, thereby reducing downtime. It provides the ability to seamlessly and instantaneously handle an increase in a website’s or app’s demand for resources. Vertical scaling is limited by the fact that you can only get as big as the size of the server solution with which you started if it was not initially set up to scale otherwise. Think of a two lane highway where the forest was only cleared to accommodate two lanes, versus say 8 lanes later on as traffic increases.

Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal scaling involves expanding hardware resources to allow greater workloads. Following the desktop computer analogy, instead of adding more memory, one would add additional desktops or other devices. In a hosting environment, horizontal scaling means adding additional devices, computers, or systems. Horizontal scaling provides the ability to scale wider to deal with increased work load / traffic. It is the ability to connect multiple hardware or software entities, such as servers, so that they work as a single logical unit. This kind of scaling cannot be implemented at a moment’s notice. To reiterate, there are two different ways to scale in the cloud. Vertical scaling refers to when you scale “up”. This means you add resources like memory or storage to your existing server. Horizontal scaling, or scaling “out” refers to adding more devices such as servers, rather than just adding resources. Depending on how the application is written, it can be a challenge to scale horizontally if it wasn’t set up that way initially. If you have a web tier, an app tier and a database tier going out to multiple machines that need to be load balanced, it can get complicated quickly.

Affordability & Flexibility

Generally, scalable solutions are often more affordable for businesses, and scalability in a cloud or VPS environment definitely comes with cost-effective savings. When you purchase a cloud hosting solution, you’re buying into the same infrastructure along with other organizations – it is shared. The web hosting provider scales your resources up and down as needed, just as it does for everyone else. Because much of the hardware is in use at any given time - even if not by you- the overall cost of scaling is reduced, and your web hosting provider can offer pay-as-you-use hosting solutions and other budget-friendly data-storage options. For ease of scaling at any time with either scaling solution, we recommend customers start with a (virtual or physical) web server, database server and an application server with a back up solution. This bundle is both affordable and flexible so you can easily scale horizontally or vertically. You’ve left yourself room to grow in either direction.